mouth agape to drink the flowing fate,
While chin protrudes to meet the burst o' the wave; elate
Almost, spurred on to brave necessity, expend
All life left, in one flash, as fire does at its end."

Just as good in a different style, is this quaint and quiet landscape:--

"For, arm in arm, we two have reached, nay, passed, you see,
The village-precinct; sun sets mild on Saint-Marie--
We only catch the spire, and yet I seem to know
What's hid i' the turn o' the hill: how all the graves must glow
Soberly, as each warms its little iron cross,
Flourished about with gold, and graced (if private loss
Be fresh) with stiff rope-wreath of yellow, crisp bead-blooms
Which tempt down birds to pay their supper, mid the tombs,
With prattle good as song, amuse the dead awhile,
If couched they hear beneath the matted camomile."

The poem is written in Alexandrine couplets, and is, I believe, the only
English poem of any length written in this metre since Drayton's
_Polyolbion_. Browning's metre has scarcely the flexibility of the best
French verse, but he allows himself occasionally two licenses not used
in French since the time of Marot: (1) the addition of an unaccented
syllable at the end of the first half of the verse, as:--

"'Twas not for every Gawain to gaze upon the Grail!"--

(2) the addition of two syllables, making seven instead of six beats.

"What good were else i' the drum and fife? O pleasant
land of France!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 47: _Handbook_, p. 148.]

[Footnote 48: J.T. Nettleship on "Fifine at the Fair" (_Browning
Society's Papers_, Part II. p. 223). Mr. Nettleship's elaborate analysis
of the poem is a most helpful and admirable piece of work.]

21. RED COTTON NIGHT-CAP COUNTRY; OR, TURF AND TOWERS.

[Published in 1873 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol XII. pp.
1-177).]

_Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ is a story of real life, true in all its
facts, and studied at the place where it had occurred a few years
before: St. Aubin, in Normandy (the St. Rambert of the poem). It is the
story of the life of Antoine Mellerio, the Paris jeweller, whose tragic
death occurred at St. Aubin on the 13th April 1870. A suit concerning
his will, decided only in the summer of 1872, supplied Browning with the
materials of his tragedy. In the first proof of the poem the real names
of persons and places were given; but